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Article Artículo

Workers

Taxi Alternatives Not Really So Attractive After All

The taxi industry and its start-up offshoots, such as Uber and Lyft, have been dominating the news lately; a simple Google search for Uber news, for example, produces 10.7 million results. SherpaVentures, a venture-capital firm that has invested in a number of start-ups, and whose founder was a large investor in Uber, recently released a report of what it refers to as the “on-demand economy,” which they describe as based on the “instant, pervasive access to goods and services, tailored to individual needs, often without the burden of long-term ownership or commitment.” SherpaVentures, however, paints a positive, but incomplete, picture of what these new forms of economic organization mean, especially for the workers involved. While there is a lot not to like about the report, I will limit myself here to their comparison of traditional taxi drivers and Uber drivers.

CEPR and Janine Duffy / October 24, 2014

Article Artículo

Brazil

Latin America and the Caribbean

World

“Dilma’s loss would be a loss for the world’s working class”: An Interview with Luis Gonzaga “Gegê” da Silva

The Central de Movimentos Populares (CMP) was founded in 1993, with support from liberation theology sectors of the Catholic Church, as a federation of poor people’s social movements representing the poor and working class, homeless people’s unions, Afro-Brazilian movements, working class women’s groups, housing movements, indigenous people’s organizations and the LGBT movement.  Today, it has hundreds of thousands of members, acts in nearly every state in Brazil, and is an important actor on the Latin American left.

The CMP's Luís “Gegê” Gonzaga da Silva is a former MR-8 Guerilla who was arrested and tortured during the military dictatorship and helped found the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) party in São Paulo in 1982. He has remained affiliated with the party ever since, and is one of the leaders of its internal Socialism or Barbarism Caucus. He never held public office, never benefited financially from his status as one of the party founders and has spent the last 30 years organizing mass occupations of homeless families in abandoned buildings in downtown São Paulo.

In 2005, a corrupt local judge and São Paulo military police framed him for a murder that took place in an occupied building on a day when he was not in town. He eventually spent 54 days behind bars before Landless Peasants’ Movement (MST) lawyers got him out on habeas corpus. Declining an invitation by Hugo Chávez to move to Venezuela, at the age of 64 he decided to go underground and spent two years in hiding, as a group of Brazil’s best human rights lawyers worked pro-bono to clear his name.  When the charges were thrown out, he returned to his public housing apartment in a former abandoned building in downtown São Paulo and picked up where he left off, leading a squatters movement called the Movimento de Moradia do Centro de São Paulo (MMC). I spoke with him by Skype recently to find out what he thinks about this Sunday’s presidential elections.

Gegê
(Photo by Brian Mier)

CEPR and Brian Mier (Guest post) / October 24, 2014

Article Artículo

David Brooks' Great Adventures in Fantasy Land

David Brooks has a tough job. He is supposed to present an intellectually respectable case for a political party that denies human caused global warming and has questions about evolution and the shape of the earth. This is why he must depart from the truth in laying out the path forward for the economy in his column this morning.

He gives us four items to move the economy forward, but we don't have to get beyond the first one to realize that he is not serious. Brooks tells us:

"If you get outside the partisan boxes, there’s a completely obvious agenda to create more middle-class, satisfying jobs. The federal government should borrow money at current interest rates to build infrastructure, including better bus networks so workers can get to distant jobs. The fact that the federal government has not passed major infrastructure legislation is mind-boggling, considering how much support there is from both parties."

Really? There is bipartisan support for having the federal government borrow money (i.e. run larger deficits) to build up the infrastructure? Is Paul Ryan calling for this? Ted Cruz? Marco Rubio? John Boehner? Who are the Republicans who are there demanding that the government run larger deficits to build up the infrastructure?

Brooks could do the country an enormous public service here by naming names. The reality is that President Obama has been unable to get any notable Republican support for even nickel and dime infrastructure projects. It probably wouldn't even matter if he agreed to restrict the spending to Republican congressional districts.

Then we get Brooks telling us:

"The government should reduce its generosity to people who are not working but increase its support for people who are. That means reducing health benefits for the affluent elderly."

There are two questions that come up here. First what is the definition of "affluent" and second what counts as "generosity."  When we were debating tax brackets in 2012 the Republicans insisted that you wouldn't be wealthy enough to pay higher taxes unless your income was above $400,000 a year. By contrast, President Obama put the cutoff at $250,000.

If we accept either of these definitions and think that the excessive generosity takes the form of Social Security and Medicare benefits, then we can stop right here. The money involved is too trivial to make any difference in the lives of working people. In order to have anything worth the trouble we would have redefine affluent to something like an income of $40,000 a year.

Dean Baker / October 24, 2014

Article Artículo

Haiti

Latin America and the Caribbean

World

Haiti Cholera Victims Get First Hearing in Court

“Haitian people are all too familiar with the court expressing sympathy to their plight but closing doors to them,” concluded Muneer Ahmad, Clinical Professor of Law at Yale Law School, at today’s federal District Court hearing concerning the U.N.’s immunity for introducing cholera to Haiti. “That need not be the case here,” said Ahmad.

For one day, at least, the Southern District federal court in New York did open their doors, as Judge Oetken heard oral arguments in the case George et al. V. United Nations et al. The question before the court today was whether or not the U.N. and its officers should have immunity from claims arising from the introduction of cholera into Haiti by U.N. troops in October 2010.  

“It is not seriously disputed that the U.N. is responsible for causing this devastating epidemic,” stated Beatrice Lindstrom, a staff attorney at the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and counsel for the thousands of Haitian cholera victims represented in the suit.  The U.N. did not appear in court but rather it was U.S. government attorney Ellen Blain who spoke in defense of U.N. immunity, citing the U.S.’s obligation as host nation to the U.N.

Lindstrom argued that the U.N.’s immunity, as called for in Section 2 of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations [doc] (CPIUN) did not need to be expressly waived by the U.N., because it had failed to provide an alternative dispute mechanism, as called for in Section 29 of the CPIUN.  Lindstrom stated that these two sections were “two-sides of the came coin” and that the convention must be interpreted “in whole.”  By failing to live up to its obligations under Section 29, the U.N. would not be able to then claim immunity under Section 2. U.S. attorneys argued that there was no link between the two sections and pointed to previous cases where U.S. courts have upheld immunity.

However, in those previous cases, the plaintiffs argued, the U.N. had provided an alternative dispute mechanism, and the question was over its adequacy. This was the first case before U.S. courts where the U.N. had failed entirely to live up to its obligations under Section 29, according to the plaintiffs as well as international law scholars, who filed amicus curiae with the court.

Jake Johnston / October 23, 2014

Article Artículo

Brazil

Latin America and the Caribbean

World

How Many Extra Votes Does Brazilian Opposition Candidate Aécio Neves Get from Media Bias?

The second round of Brazil’s presidential elections, taking place Sunday, could be close according to polls showing President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party (PT) favored by 52 percent over challenger Aécio Neves of the Social Democratic Party (PSDB) with 48 percent. As we noted with Mexico’s 2012 presidential elections, media coverage can have a strong impact on election turnout and voter preferences, and there is compelling research [doc] that Mexico’s TV duopoly was decisive in determining the outcome of Mexico’s 2006 election. While Brazil’s media is mostly opposed to the PT, it hasn’t been able to swing recent presidential elections – but it appears it’s not for a lack of trying.

Manchetômetro (literal translation: “headline meter”), an independent project affiliated with the Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Políticos at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, has analyzed major media coverage of the main candidates and parties in Brazil. Focusing on TV coverage on Brazil’s largest audience TV news program “Jornal Nacional,” and front-page coverage in Brazil’s three largest newspapers (Folha de S. Paulo, O Globo and O Estado de São Paulo), Manchetômetro has documented a pattern of lopsided coverage that has disproportionately put Dilma Rousseff and the PT in a negative light, while opposition candidate Aécio Neves of the PSDB (and first round challenger Marina Silva) have received much more positive treatment and much less negative coverage, proportionately. Manchetômetro’s analysis also reveals that this bias against the PT is not new; coverage favored Fernando Henrique Cardoso (of the PSDB) over Rousseff’s predecessor, Lula da Silva during the 1998 election, and there was also more favorable treatment of the economic situation under Cardoso than the current economic downturn under Dilma, though the former was significantly worse than the latter.

TV Coverage: “Jornal Nacional”

Globo’s decades-old “Jornal Nacional” is considered to be a leading news program on Brazilian television; with around 18 million viewers (in 2013) it has a total audience of about twice the combined viewers of the four leading U.S. Sunday morning news talk shows (“This Week,” “Face the Nation,” “Meet the Press” and “Fox News Sunday”). The program’s influence may not be surprising considering Globo’s dominant position in Brazil’s media landscape. In a 2009 book, Giancarlo Summa (who did communications for Lula’s 2006 campaign) noted that Globo controlled 61.5 percent of UHF television stations, 31.8 percent of VHF TV, 40.7 percent of newspaper distribution, 30.1 percent of AM radio, 28 percent of FM radio and - through an association with Rupert Murdoch - 77 percent of the cable TV market.

Manchetômetro found a strong bias against Dilma Rousseff in “Jornal Nacional” coverage. During the campaign period (beginning July 6, and up to October 22), 21 percent of the coverage of Rousseff was negative, the most of any candidate. The percentage of positive coverage that Rousseff received was just 1 percent, much less than any other candidate. (Rousseff also had 78 percent “neutral” treatment.)

Dan Beeton and Jeanette Bonifaz / October 23, 2014

Article Artículo

Government

Health and Social Programs

Government Spending on the Forbes 400 Compared with Government Spending on Kids

It is a popular sport in policy circles to complain that the government spends so much more on seniors that it spends on kids. The gap between spending on seniors and spending on kids comes from taking average Social Security and Medicare benefits, along with some other programs, and showing that is vastly exceeds what we spend on kids. (The calculation usually leaves out state and local expenditures, which accounts for the bulk of education spending.)

The problem with this calculation is that seniors have paid for Social Security and Medicare benefits through the payroll taxes taken out of their paycheck over their working lifetime. According to calculations from the Urban Institute, the typical retiree pays more into Social Security than she can expect to get back in benefits.

Dean Baker / October 21, 2014

Article Artículo

The Post Tells Us the Economy is SO Complicated

The Post is really angry that people are talking about the rich getting everything at the expense of everyone else. It demands in the headline of an article, "stop with the fiction of a binary economy." 

Actually, nothing in the article really gives us much reason to question the reality of the binary economy that many economists have written about. For example, it tells readers:

"The jobless rate in the center of the United States from North Dakota to Texas is less than 5 percent and has been well below the national rate for five years."

Yes, and this means what? Wages are rising in North Dakota, with a labor force of 470,000 (just over 0.3 percent of the national labor force), but not much in Texas. Furthermore, the country had a 4.0 percent unemployment rate as a year-round average in 2000. This meant that many states were around 3.0 percent.

Then we get this bizarre discussion:

"But the top two income quintiles saw annual gains of a percent to a percent and a half until 2008.

"That isn’t what it was in the 20th century, but we tend to forget that the 20th century also saw much higher inflation. And we forgot that just as income growth has slowed, the costs of many basic goods and services also dropped. In 1950, food represented 32 percent of a family’s budget, according to federal statistics; today, it accounts for less than 15 percent. Energy use has seen similar declines, along with clothing and basic necessities. Health care costs more, but that in part is because we are living longer. Education eats up more costs, but many more people are going to college."

Dean Baker / October 19, 2014